The Bell Jar Chronicles

The rise of Trump has been accompanied by an increasingly emboldened far right. It started, or at least came to my attention, first in the guise of big mouths like Milo Yiannopoulos (yes I know he's British but America gave him the platform) who taunted lefties and the feminists. Then there were some guys in suits whose names I can't recall but who definitely had more of disturbing sort of White Supremacist agenda. More recently we had actual Nazis marching in Charlottesville with the KKK garb and the flying of flags with swastikas on them. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on the American south culture and politics, but that's some fucked up shit there that America has never kicked over. I concern myself here with the British left's reaction to all this, specifically the far left. There has been a general cheering on from the British far left of the American far left who have the idea that we rid society of these disturbing elements by punching them. P...

Last week I took my daughter to register at her chosen college. Much to my surprise she has ended up at the college in the borough I grew up in, and at the college I would have gone to had I not gone to my school's sixth form. It's a surprise because living in a city I had hoped and expected that my children would take advantage of the city colleges, but she wouldn't even go near Birmingham Metropolitan, or BMET as it likes to call itself. It probably hardly matters. Most colleges these days are new, architecturally designed buildings and offer the same courses.  This college is brand spanking new. The old college had been a 1970s municipal type building up the High Street, sat amidst all the more glorious Victorian buildings. I should imagine it's been knocked down now. I don't know as there is not much reason to go up the High Street anymore because all the shops are now centrally located. Or at least the units where shops should be are. The town library is, ...

I had not met with this particular doctor before and at first I was hopeful because her whole skit seemed to be efficient professionalism, and there are worse things a doctor can be.  Events had moved on since I had made the appointment the week before, and I had decided just to run a few things past her. Maybe she could offer some useful advice. The doubt that was going to happen rose fairly quickly. As I talked, giving snappy bits of information about what had happened in my family recently, she got up and went and messed with her printer. It's always disconcerting when the person you are talking to randomly gets up to go and do something else. When someone talks to me, even if they are full of shit, generally I like to do them a service by not only listening, but showing them that I am listening. It helps a person more than anything you could say.    It turned out that she wasn't randomly messing with her printer, but getting a piece of paper from the printer'...

The good thing about attending routine appointments is the waiting. Inevitably, although we are told to turn up ten minutes before the allotted appointment time with our dentist/doctor/opticians, we always find ourselves sitting on chairs in a waiting room, waiting.  I like this dead time. There is nothing I can reasonably do but read. The nagging whispers that I should be attending to housework, or tackling some task, or running an errand are silenced, because I literally cannot do any of those things here. I can't even phone my mom, because there is no privacy. So I sit and read and for a while all the pressures of life are off me. And so I expected it to be yesterday, when I went to see a doctor I didn't know about something I didn't want to talk about. It might be fair to say that I had even looked forward to this waiting time, which might say how bad things have been at home lately, but which also says that the waiting area in the clinic I attend is a fairly p...